I was planning on posting a formative assessment piece but I saw this wonderful blog and couldn’t help but share it just in time for Valentine’s Day. Thanks Cindi! (Photo by THOR, via Flickr Creative Commons)
By Cindi Rigsbee

I love love.
For many years, I tried to recreate the enchantment I experienced with Valentine’s Day as a young girl by offering a “Love In” for my students on February 14. I created “love stations” that students rotated through to find different tasks. At one stop, they found compound-word hearts: a basket full of cut hearts, each labeled with one half of a compound word, serving as a fun puzzle. At another, students had to read a love poem from a stack of poetry books. “Write a love poem” was the task at a different table, and my favorite, Sonnet 18, would serve as the example. But before all that, students had to listen to a love song so they would be in a “love-ly” mood.

For the most part, my middle school students were willing participants (though they were more excited about the candy-gram deliveries that day). It was a day when even students with minor disagreements with one another took a day off to be nice.

But then it ended. I’m not sure exactly what year I had to cancel the “Love In.” At some point, I realized that I needed that time to teach specifically to my standards, answer my principal’s daily question “How will this get results?,” and search for more rigorous work.

But still I believe, deep inside my Valentine-shaped heart, that teachers can find love in a school building. Here’s four ways how.